Shift Robotics’ Moonwalkers make gliding through a warehouse or distribution center a real possibility for employees who spend countless hours on their feet.
Using Moonwalkers, the quirky robotic shoes that slide on like a pair of Tevas over regular shoes and one of Time’s 200 Best Inventions of 2023, warehouse workers and people toiling in a similar capacity can “walk at the speed of run,” according to Rob Vickery, global head of business development for Shift Robotics of Austin, Tex.
That’s due to the help of an AI-powered neuromuscular skeletal algorithm, which mirrors human movements and allows each shoe to sync with the other, quickly adapting to the user’s natural gait and speed, then enhancing it. Shift Robotics claims the Moonwalkers X can travel at up to 7 mph.
Dave Mawhinney, founding board member of Shift Robotics, said the futuristic footwear helps accelerate the pace of an everyday human task: walking.
“We call [them] the Moonwalkers because, just like Michael Jackson and moonwalking, it looked like he was gliding. You feel like you’re gliding, and the best analogy I can give is the people-movers in the airport. You get on there just walking normally, but you’re passing by everybody a lot faster. That’s exactly how it feels with these shoes,” Mawhinney told Sourcing Journal.
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And the extra speed warehouse employees gain from their high-tech kicks has led to major productivity increases in tests with early partners. In all of the company’s case studies, productivity has immediately doubled—and is 2.5 times higher in some instances, Mawhinney said.
Because of that rapid uptick, Vickery said, payback on a company’s investment in Moonwalkers happens in less than a month.
As clients see productivity gains, they also stand to see greater employee satisfaction, Mawhinney noted.
“One of the warehouse workers said to her boss… ‘I used to have the worst job in the company; now I have the best job in the company.’ It makes work fun again,” he said.
Shift Robotics first found its roots at Carnegie Mellon University’s Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship, where Mawhinney serves as the executive director.
The company’s CEO, Xunjie Zhang, first shared the idea for Moonwalkers with Mawhinney as a graduate student pursuing a master’s degree in robotics at the prestigious Pittsburgh institution.
Zhang told Mawhinney about his “crazy idea” as a student, then moved into the Swartz Center as an entrepreneur after he graduated in 2017.
From there, Zhang and his team of engineers created nine prototypes of what would eventually become the original Moonwalkers. The robotic shoes are designed for commercial use, particularly in warehouses, distribution centers and other jobs in logistics that require constant walking.
The Moonwalkers X are Zhang and team’s latest iteration on the innovation, which solve for a few hiccups users experienced in the first-generation Moonwalkers.
Vickery said the new version, which has six wheels on each shoe instead of 10, is lighter, quicker and faster than the original.
The updated version also subtracts one pound from the weight of each shoe because their gearboxes are made of magnesium.
And now, wearers will be able to accelerate faster than ever, Vickery said, allowing them to quickly glide from point A to point B. In the original Moonwalkers, engineers opted for slower acceleration as a design choice for safety reasons.
Safety has always been at the heart of Shift Robotics, Mawhinney emphasized. That’s why none of the trials the company has conducted with Swedish home goods giant Ikea and discount technology purveyor PC Liquidations have yielded any injuries or accidents.
Shift Robotics will begin shipping the Moonwalkers X footwear in the first half of 2024, though there’s no official launch date or price. A pair of the first-version Moonwalkers costs $1,400, and it remains to be seen whether the price will increase or decrease for the updated version.
The electric shoes use batteries, which take about 90 minutes to charge. A full charge allows users to walk between five and seven miles, depending on conditions and speed.
That in mind, Mawhinney said, companies looking to derive the maximum benefit from the rollerskate-adjacent shoes will need to purchase two pairs per employee. And so far, partners have done just that.
“They’re electric vehicles on your feet,” he said.
Shift Robotics hasn’t yet partnered with a warehouse or distribution center that works exclusively in fashion or footwear sectors.
So far, many of the original Moonwalkers sales have come from individual consumers looking to get around quicker or enhance their mobility.
That could soon change, as Shift Robotics slides into the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week.
“We’ve built our production capability so that we can produce thousands and thousands of pairs. Our coming-out party to the business-to-business side is CES,” Vickery told Sourcing Journal. “Our opportunity to scale up quickly is on the B2B side, but we’re not abandoning the B2C side at all; that is part of our long-term growth plan.”